[lbo-talk] The Greatest of All Time/Babe

Dennis Claxton ddclaxton at earthlink.net
Mon May 15 11:25:47 PDT 2006


Sports is not a big topic here, but race and extract of sheep testes might make this lbotalk ready. Barry Bonds has been stuck on 713, one shy of Ruth's record, for several days now:


>Bonding With the Babe
>
>By Dave Zirin
>
>In a March column titled "Time for Selig to Bury Bonds," New York
>Daily News sports pasha Mike Lupica wrote, "They will cheer [Bonds]
>in San Francisco when he passes Babe Ruth, and we will hear again
>that his most vituperative critics hate him, the arrogant black
>star, for passing the portly white guy who has been one of the
>famous names in American sports since the '20s. As if Bonds is
>breaking some kind of record by passing Ruth. As if we care about
>that anymore."
>
>But as Bonds, now with 713 home runs, staggers on buckling knees
>toward Ruth's epic 714 total, Lupica has been proven painfully
>wrong. Even though the actual home run record is Hank Aaron's 755,
>the baseball world is on edge as Bonds approaches the Great Bambino.

[....]


>Even though Bonds has never been convicted of any crime, has never
>tested positive for a banned substance and has played the game at a
>higher level than any player of his chemically enhanced generation,
>he is the game's pariah, the media-appointed "symbol of the steroid
>era." Now that the owners have mined their billions from the 1990s
>home run binge, and everyone has a Congressional hangover, Bonds is
>persona non grata.

[...]


>[Babe} Ruth's 714 home run record lacks the spit-shined purity his
>backers trumpet. The Sultan of Swat made his bones playing against
>only a select segment of the population because of the ban on
>players whose skin color ran brown to black. Ruth never had to hit
>against Negro League greats Satchel Paige or Lefty Mathis to amass
>the magic 714. Yet no asterisk for institutionalized racism mars the
>Babe's marks. Ruth also was a habitual user of a banned substance
>that was deemed unambiguously illegal by the federal government--a
>drug Ruth believed enhanced his performance: alcohol. Ruth was a
>star during the roaring prohibition 1920s, and as teammate Joe Dugan
>said, "Babe would go day and night, broads and booze."
>
>But Ruth didn't just stop at the watering hole to find an edge.
>According to The Baseball Hall of Shame's Warped Record Book, by
>Bruce Nash, Allan Zullo and Bob Smith, the Bambino fell ill one year
>attempting to inject himself with extract from a sheep's testes.
>This effort by more than a few athletes of his era to seek the
>healing and strengthening properties of testosterone prefigured the
>craze for steroids. When Ruth fell ill from his attempted
>enhancement, the media was told that Ruth merely had "a bellyache."
>This was believable since Ruth was a glutton, famed for eating
>eighteen-egg omelets. The Sultan of Swat was also a glutton for
>women and violence, and he could be roused to fisticuffs if it was
>suggested, as it often was, that he was part black. The Babe's
>famous trade-out of Boston in 1920 was justified by Sox owner Harry
>Frazee by saying that Ruth was "one of the most selfish and
>inconsiderate athletes I have ever seen."

[....]

http://www.edgeofsports.com/2006-05-09-185/index.html



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